Active forum topics

Planet with three suns challenges astronomers

In a scenario out of "Star Wars," astronomers have detected a planet outside our solar system with not one, but three suns, a finding that challenges astronomers' theories of planetary formation.

The planet, a gas giant slightly larger than Jupiter, orbits the main star of a triple-star system known as HD 188753 in the constellation Cygnus ("The Swan").

The stellar trio and its planet are about 149 light-years from Earth and about as close to each other as our sun is to Saturn, U.S. scientists reported Thursday in the current edition of the journal Nature.

A light-year is about 6 trillion miles, the distance light travels in a year.

If you stood on the planet's surface, you would see three suns in sky, although its orbit centers around the main yellow star among the trio. The larger of the other two suns would be orange and the smaller would be red, astronomers at California Institute of Technology said in a statement.

An artists' rendering of the planet and three stars, as seen from a hypothetical moon, is available at here.

The new finding could upset existing theories that planets usually form out of gas and dust circling a single star, and could lead scientists to look in new places for planets.

"The implication is that there are more planets out there than we thought," the commentary said.

Caltech astronomer Maciej Konacki, who wrote the research article, refers to the new type of planets as "Tatooine planets," because of the similarity to Luke Skywalker's view of his home planet by the same name, with its multiple suns, in the original "Star Wars" film.

The fact that a planet can even exist in a multiple-star system is amazing in itself, according to Konacki. Binary and multiple stars are quite common in the solar neighborhood, and in fact outnumber single stars by some 20 percent.

But so far, most extrasolar planets -- those discovered outside our planetary system -- have been detected by watching for a characteristic wobble in the stars their orbit, reflecting the gravitation pull the planets exert on their suns.

This method is less effective for binary and multiple star systems, and existing theories said planets were unlikely to form in this kind of environment.

Konacki found a new way to identify planets by measuring velocities of all bodies in a binary or multiple star system.

More in Tux Machines

Lumina Desktop 0.8.3 Released!

The next version of the Lumina Desktop Environment has just been released!
This is mainly a bugfix release to correct an urgent issue with the system tray on FreeBSD 11, but there are a number of other slight improvements/updates included as well. The full list of changes is included at the bottom of this announcement, but the notable changes are as follows:
New Panel Plugin: “Application Launcher“
This allows the user to pin the shortcut for an application directly to a panel.
New Utility: “lumina-xconfig“
This utility allows the user to easily enable/disable additional monitors/screens within the desktop session.
Fix the issue with transparent system tray icons on FreeBSD 11
Add support for the XDG autostart specifications.

Netflix has more than 50 open source projects

My team has become very fond of an open source tool called Browserify. It was originally designed to allow the Node.js modules to be used in the browser, but we’ve leveraged it as the primary component in our build process. Over the last year, it has helped us to turn our monolithic code into a set of independent, maintainable modules. Previously, we were concatenating a big file and maintaining subsystem independence using namespaces, so this has been a big change for us.

Cinnamon 2.4.7 Arrives with Numerous Fixes, Should Be in Repos Soon

Cinnamon is a desktop environment built by the Linux Mint team and it's implemented by default in the Mint OSes. The current update, 2.4.7 is just a maintenance one, but it's pretty extensive and it comes with a ton of changes.

Bringing open source to the NHS

Malcolm Senior, director of informatics at the Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust, has been writing about the prospect of open source in the NHS.
The comments from Senior come a year after the announcement that Taunton and Somerset NHS Foundation Trust had signed a contract to implement the UK's first open source electronic patient record.
Senior states that the open source approach in the NHS is not new, in fact the NHS has been doing it since the early 80's.

Latest News

Before ending out March, here's some new OpenGL Linux benchmarks comparing the closed-source Catalyst 15.3 Beta driver against the Linux 4.0 development kernel with Mesa 10.6 Git for the freshest open-source graphics driver code.

5 questions to determine if open source is a good fit for a software project

A benefit of open source in general, and commercial open source in particular, is that you have the support of others as well as the ability to do the maintenance yourself.
I hope these questions will help you determine whether open source is a good fit for your next software project. Let me know if there are other questions you would add to this list.

Clonezilla Live 2.4.0-7 Released to Fix a Btrfs Issue, Based on Debian Sid

Steven Shiau has released a new development version of his Clonezilla Live operating system aimed at system administrators who want an easy-to-use, portable, and straightforward solution for cloning disk drives.